Binaural generated tonalities for sleeping and noise-blocking

These tracks aren’t music in the usual sense. There’s no musical development beyond the initial set of paramters. From there selected randomizations give the audio constant variation. Nothing loops!

I originally made these tracks for myself as noise-blocking audio to help me sleep. I was living in a noisy neighborhood in a noisy house doing shiftwork. I tried the usual things to help me sleep through the noise: ambient music, soundproofing the room, TV background, and pure white noise. I either got sick of the music, distracted by the TV, or found that the background clunks and thumps still penetrated whatever soundproofing or competing sound source I used.

I experimented with loads of different audio combinations and finally settled on constant random variation within fairly narrow parameters. That way the sound was at a constant volume, had no surprises, yet had enough variation that thumps, voices and squwarks from the house and street could fit in without startling me awake.

Binaural beats and brainwave entrainment

One area that’s particularly difficult to mask are bass frequencies. To combat that I wanted to add a low rumble. Researching options for that led me to binaural beats. There are some pretty wild claims about the effects of binaural beats. Google around and you’ll see sites claiming that particular frequencies can produce incredibly specific effects. I’ve used binaural beats of various frequencies for years and have zoomed in on a few well-known frequencies that match brainwave frequencies for sleep and relaxation. For the first few months they gave me vivid dreams but that effect (unfortunately) gradually diminishes. It may be that I simply need to write a new track every few months. That’s definitely on the to-do list to see if I can reactivate the vivid dreams.

The two main frequencies I used are 1Hz and 7Hz. I’ve tried dozens of frequencies, buit those are the two that work best for me to promote sleep. 1Hz is within the Delta wave band and is associated with non-REM deep sleep. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_wave. The other frequency I’ve found effective is 7Hz which is either a Theta or Alpha wave depending on which definition you go by. Theta waves are associated with both dreaming and being awake yet resting. The third frequency I’ve tried is 40Hz (in the Gamma range), just because I saw it referenced online several times as the frequency to promote astral projections and transcendental states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_wave. Meh. Didn’t do much for me, but you may have better results.

By using binaural beats in this way you’re undertaking “brainwave entrainment” – which sounds a bit frightening. I recall being hesitant when first adding binaural beats to the sleep audio. Did I really want to align my brainwaves to a frequency set externally? At first it did feel a little odd but it’s hard to say whether that was real or produced by the anticipation of a weird effect. In the end a few months of vivid dreams – and years of sound sleep was the result.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment

Headphones needed

To get the true effect of the audio you need to listen through headphones. That’s because there is a separate hard left and hard right-panned sine wave at a set frequency interval. The interference pattern between these two waves produces a binaural frequency. You can read more about binaural frequencies here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats. I typically use sine waves of around 70Hz. So for example, 70Hz in the left and 63Hz in the right produce a binaural beat of 7Hz – but you’ll only get this effect through headphones.

If you want to use these tracks for their original purpose, which was to mask external noise to enable a solid sleep, then just listen on normal speakers. Just be aware that there is constant low frequency being pushed out and if you have expensive speakers with bass boost or ‘loudness’ turned on then your cones may be put under strain.

Downloads

Finally, the downloads. The audio examples are just 3-minute low bitrate snippets of the full track. The downloads are each 256K-bitrate MP3 files of exactly one hour in length. That way you can use them in a meditation, massage or relaxation session as a timer. The tracks gently fade out at the end. I find that I naturally wake up when the track ends because of the contrast of silence. The zip files contain nothing except the MP3.

Contact me!

If you have any comments, requests or suggestions I’d love to hear them. Enjoy!

Hall of the Ancestors (40Hz binaural)

Note that these audio files need to be listened to through headphones to get the binaural effect. Without headphones no binaural effect will be generated. Each file is exactly 1-hour long 256K-bitrate MP3. Free! If you’d like to say thanks send me an email or a small donation here: https://www.paypal.me/richarddehove Sleep well 🙂